


the winner is

by naheka



Category: Fear the Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Apocalypse, Vaguely AU, Vaguely Canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 19:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10520766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naheka/pseuds/naheka
Summary: Calicia, pre and post Apocalypse, and Nick.





	

Alicia has only one number she keeps off _do not disturb_. Nick’s, because once she blocked him and found out a week later they found him under the freeway by the hardware store with the needle still stuck in his arm. So now she checks her phone obsessively and when she can get her hands on his, enables the share my location feature. He hasn’t figured that part out yet, she thinks, but it’s hard to track a junkie who’d hock his left thumb for a hotshot, nevermind a smartphone. He’s always been so good at being her exception.

Sometimes she likes to see how many messages and voicemails and missed calls she can rack up from her mother, but it often reaches a point of diminishing returns, where her belly burns and her fists clench until her nails sting in her palms, all that evidence of her mother’s disregard in the cradle of her fingers, stark-ugly over the background wallpaper photo of nick clean and smiling with his arm around her shoulder from three–no, four now, four Christmases ago.

++

She’s leaned up against the row of lockers with a girl from her history class watching Matt look sort of wistfully at her out of the corner of her eye and wondering when he’ll work up the nerve to ask her out proper when she thinks to check on Nick. His location is thrumming strong at home where she’d rolled him onto his front on the bathroom floor and left him passed out next to the dribbles of vomit from where he’d missed the toilet the night before. She taps her nail against his pin and traces a little heart around it, since no one will know but her that she did it.

It’s pure luck that the little notification pops up before she tucks her phone back away to head to english–Chris’s name, lowercase with no emojis, the grey anonymous photo bubble, vibrating with a call. She’s answering before she can think too much about it.

“Alicia?” his voice is crackly and she makes an impatient gesture at her friend to stop talking. “Are you at school?”

She snorts. “Aren’t you?”

There’s a long sort of pause. “Can you… can you come get me?”

++

“Well,” Alicia says, bumping the curb with the front tire and leaning across the passenger seat to open the door for him “If you weren’t a Clark before…”

Chris has got a pretty impressive black eye, and he’d looked so sad when she’d pulled up, all hunched in and limp haired, his shirt torn across his chest and the zip of his hoodie hanging off, that she hadn’t felt up to much else teasing. He slides into the car with a wince sighs heavy long. “Seatbelt,” she tells him, and he cuts his eyes to her and curls his lip, sending a fresh welldrop of blood streaking across his chin. he wipes it away with the back of his hand. “Fine,” she mutters, and points the car towards home. “My place?”

He deigns to speak to her. “I dont want my mom to see me like this.”

++

Alicia sits him on the toilet seat. “Mind the vomit,” she tells him, and tilts his head up to get some light on his face. “Hold still.” She gathers the kit from the mirror cabinet and sloshes some antiseptic onto a cotton swab.

He barely winces while she cleans him up, although his eyes dart down to where Nick is drooling onto the tile near his left sneaker. “Is he…?”

Alicia puts a butterfly bandage over chris’s right eyebrow and kisses the center of it, feather light. “He’s a Clark.”

++  
Alicia wakes up early to bundle Chris into the car, some of Nick’s old clothes hanging off his smaller frame. Nick was gone when she woke up, although she half thinks he’ll be back on the floor when she gets home from school. Chris slouches down in the chair and glares at the glovebox, surly. She checks her phone at a redlight, 3 texts from Madison from the last week, and by some quick math they haven’t spoken except for when Nick staggered by the dinner table to eat six rolls and pocket Madison’s watch while she pretended not to notice.

“My father died in a car accident,” she says, abrupt. Chris blinks. The seatbelt whines through the pulley and clicks secure and she snaps a picture of him before dropping him off at his school. She sets it as his contact picture and adds the angry face emoji next to his name. She takes him off do not disturb and texts him: _i’ll pick you up at four._

He leans back through the open window, gangly elbows and frowny. “I’m not a Clark, I’m a Manawa.”

Alicia drops her sunglasses down her nose and looks at his busted face, his split knuckles, all that helpless rage boiling over and the deep well of quiet sadness. “Baby brother, we’re all of us Clarks.”

++

“Chris is coming over tomorrow for the weekend.”

Alicia pokes her meatloaf and sighs big enough for everyone to know she’s so incredibly put upon. “Great.”

Her mother shoots her a look. “We thought maybe you could take him around the neighborhood. Down to the park?”

“We,” Alicia repeats, bored. “Did _we_ think about lending _me_ the car?”  
“You and Nick used to fight me tooth and nail to walk there.” Madison’s voice has gone fond the way it does when she reminisces, remembers Nick when his grin was golden airy and his hair was always clean.

Alicia feels it, the spike of white hot rage that makes her vision shake and her fingers tremble. “That’s because he’d rather trek two miles in the rain than spend two seconds with you in an enclosed space.”

Her mother’s fork clatters. Travis sends her to her room and she stomps all the way there.

++

Chris is sitting at the table, slumped in on himself. Alicia plucks an apple from the fruit bowl Madison puts out when people come over and sinks her teeth into the flesh. Madison bustles in with two plates piled high and Alicia rolls her eyes.

“Travis says French Toast is your favourite.” Madison slips plates in front of them and Alicia frowns down at her hashbrowns and poached eggs.

“Thank you,” Chris mumbles.

“She’s gone full Martha,” Alicia mutters. Madison’s smile goes a little frozen and she retreats with a cutting look. Chris huffs, almost a laugh, and Alicia looks at him, surprised. He looks back and there’s something there, in the dark brown of his eyes. Madison clatters a pan in the kitchen and he looks away.

“I don’t like eggs,” she says. He shrugs. The smell of the hashbrowns makes her nauseous and she pushes the plate away. She watches him drink coffee in little sips. “Do you want to go to the park?”

++

“This is fun,” Chris says, flat.

Alicia shrugs. “Wasn’t my idea. Thank the evil stepmother.”

“That makes you Snow White,” he tells her. “The most beautiful girl in all the land? Conceited much?”

It startles a smile out of her and she shoves at his shoulder. He lurches, surprised, and his laugh is higher pitched than she thought it would be, echoes of a little boy over the just-starting barely there swell of his shoulders and his biceps.

“I wanna swing,” she says. “Push me.”

“Okay,” he agrees. His hands are warm on her back and when she jumps he catches the plastic seat so the chain doesn’t hit her.

She dusts her hands off on her shorts. The sky is quickly darkening; the streetlights come on with a click-whine. She sees him look towards the road. “Curfew up, champ?”

He rolls his eyes. “My turn.”

She pushes him and when she jumps on his back they flip over, shouting. He lands on her and her teeth clack together. Her fingers slide between his when he drags her to her feet and she wears his hoodie home, not much bigger than her own.

++

Alicia gets the text during AP Biology. She tells the teacher she has to go to the bathroom and isn’t even questioned when she takes her backpack with her. She pulls the bus schedule up on her phone and calls a cab when she sees the transfers and travel time.

Nick is waiting on the curb of the address he’d sent her. His hair is limp and his eyes are too wide and his smile too glassy and he smells like musty clothes and old cigarettes and vinegar smoke and she still noses into his neck and breathes deep. “You’re a mess,” she says, and pours him into the backseat of the cab.

“Leeshy,” he mumbles, and curls up against her side as best he can. She strokes his hair and hums an old lullaby and tries not to cry.

++

He comes down in the shower, her shirt and shorts sticking to her, her bra discarded on the tile floor. His boxers are plastered to his body and riding low on his hips and he curses her while she wrestles shampoo into his hair. He doesn’t remember calling her or the ride over and he tells her she’s pathetic while she scrubs the grime off his skin before apologizing profusely while she towels him off.

“Sorry,” he says again.

She tucks him into his bed, fresh sheets smoothed on by her own fingers while he dressed himself dripping in the closet. She tucks the comforter under his chin and kisses his forehead. “You always say that.”

He catches her wrist and kisses the center of her palm. “I always mean it.” He pats the bed next to him and scootches over and she hates herself but she doesn’t even hesitate before crawling beside him and resting her head on his chest to hear his heart thump away.

++

Madison beams to see him at dinner. “My boy,” she says, fonder than Alicia has ever heard her. She touches his cheek and falters when he pulls away. “We were thinking,” she says, forced cheery, “of–maybe you sharing your room. With Chris.”

Alicia and Nick make eye contact. She matches his smirk. “Maybe we can get bunk beds.” Alicia ducks her head, laughing at her meatloaf.

Madison talks about merging families and a new start and fixing broken homes and in the background the answering machine picks up and the registrar of her school intones that she’d skipped two periods that day. “This is how it should be,” Madison is saying. Under the table, Nick touches her knee and she feels warm for the first time since he left her.

++

She skips school and they take the bus to the beach. He holds her hand and she puts Madison’s sunhat on his head to make him laugh. He walks into the ocean to his knees and she takes off her shirt to lie in the sun in her bra and her jean shorts. She squeaks when he drops wet sand on her cheek.

“Fish belly,” he teases. He flops beside her and kisses her cheek, smacking. She puts her sunglasses on and naps against his shoulder with the sea salt breeze in her nose and his skin sand-gritty on her cheek.

He walks her to the door and pauses and it’s not that she wasn’t expecting it, but it’s crushing all the same. “You promised,” she tells the peephole. He flinches, very slightly, and she says it again to make him hurt. “You promised.”

He touches her jaw and she leans into his hand. “I’m sorry.”

++

Alicia comes home and Madison is in Nick’s room. “What are you doing?” She grabs a box by the door and shakes the contents out onto the bed. “What are you doing?”

“Alicia–”

“How could you?” She yanks the dresser drawers open and starts shoving the clothes back into their former places, careless and messy. “How could you, _how could_ –”

It deteriorates from there. She screams and curses and cries and when her mother tries to soothe her, shocked by her vehemence, Alicia spits that her father never would have died if Madison hadn’t made him late for work that morning. Madison slaps her across the face and freezes, horrified.

Alicia is shocked into silence, hand over her suddenly warm cheek. “Mom?” she asks, shaky little girl voice.

“Go to your room,” Madison orders.

Alicia packs a backpack. She crawls out the window and scales the lattice the way Nick taught her when she was nine.

++

It takes four days for Chris to find her.

She sleeps on a friend’s couch for two of them, until their parents get suspicious, and doesn’t sleep on the third, searching the houses she’s found Nick at before, all from the list she keeps on her phone of the addresses he’s sent her over the past. On the fourth day, she goes to the park.

Chris is on the swings, feet dragging in the tanbark. She hesitates, then draws near. “You look worse than me,” she says, and he startles. “Another visit already?”

He shrugs. “I got expelled from my old school.”

“Even Mom kicked you out, huh?”

He stands so fast she stumbles back, one hand fisted in her shirt. “Don’t talk about her,” he says, low.

Alicia blinks. His lip is split, puffy and red looking, and his eye blackened around the socket. She touches the cut through his eyebrow and he shudders at the gentle point-pressure of her nail. “Poor boy,” she murmurs, “all alone without his mother.”

He shoves her hard enough to knock her on her ass and she smiles at the bullet blue sky when he walks away. She goes home.

++

Alicia wakes up tired of being cold and alone. She sleeps with her phone under her pillow so the buzzing will wake her but it’s lain silent for days and she hurts to curl up in her bed. Even as a twin the expanse of the mattress is massive and too flat without the dip of his body beside her.

The wood floor creaks under the balls of her feet and she creeps down the hall. His door is cracked open and the knob turns easily under her hand. “Chris,” she whispers, peering down at him. There’s a fresh bruise high on his cheekbone. “Chris.”

His voice is clearer than she thought it would be, so late at night and so long after his light went out. “What are you doing?”

“I already have a brother,” she tells him. “You’re not him.”

“I already have a mother,” he says. She can see his eyes blink in the streetlight filtering through the window.

“Good. Maddie’s not much good for anyone else.”

He slides back and lifts the sheets and she shakes her head. He watches her back all the way up to the door and the last thing she sees when she shuts it are his eyes, quiet and calm and almost knowing.

++

Alicia hears the fight before she sees it. Shouting and cursing and the chanting encouraging jeers of her peers. She hears him and pauses, locker open. The mirror attached to the back of the door winks at her and she frowns at herself. Then she sighs and slams it shut.

She picks the taller of the two boys pinning Chris to the ground and gives herself a running start. He flails when she jumps on his back. The other one calls her a cunt before he kicks her in the ribs and the last thing she hears before her head bangs off the concrete is Chris roaring in rage.

++

They wait in the nurse’s office for their parents. Chris’s eyebrow had to be superglued shut and there’s an icepack strapped to her temple, leaving her lopsided and woozy. He sits next to her and lets her chin rest against his shoulder so her neck doesn’t hurt. She touches the split knuckles on his right hand and the scraped skin on her knee.

“It feels good,” she says. She hears her mother coming down the hall.

Chris touches her hair, almost reverent. It feels so different from Nicky’s tugging.

++

Alicia wakes up when her phone buzzes under her ear. _I’ll come home soon_. She clicks it dark and quiet and hidden from his lies and creeps down the hallway.

“Chris,” she whispers from his bedside.

“Alicia,” he says. She lies behind him and they press their bloodied knuckles flush against each other. He tastes like coffee and toothpaste and he says her name like he’s scared it’ll shatter off his tongue.

++

Alicia is so pale now. Chris remembers when she used to be golden under the sun, especially in the summer. Jeans cut so short the pockets hung past the ends of them, legs going on forever. Tank tops and crop tops and sometimes walking around the house in a sports bra with a cold soda can pressed to the back of her neck, her hair escaping its braid in little wisps.

Now they stay quiet during the day and venture out at night and she almost glows under the moon. On the good days, she puts her arm next to his and half-giggles at the contrast. Leans her head on his shoulder and sighs so her breath ruffles his cheek and tugs playfully at his hair and murmurs about cutting it with her knife.

On the bad days she sits and looks at nothing and doesn’t even cry, flat eyed and distant and walks only when he takes her limp hand in his and tugs.

Sometimes he has bad days too. He knows because he can’t remember them and she has bruises in the shapes of his fingers on her wrists. He shakes and curls away from her and she crawls next to him and cups his face and hushes him gently and when he wakes pressed against her he kisses her wrists until she stirs and blinks and smiles soft.

When he dreams of his mother she wakes him and holds him and he doesn’t really cry anymore but she’s warm and she’s there and she combs his hair through her fingers until he can stand up again. She cries out for Nick in her sleep and he lies awake whispering her name until she goes silent, face twisted up and hands clenched.

++

Alicia has a sharpie. It’s one of the fat ones, with the big tip. Chris doesn’t know where she got it but she writes on the walls and cracked bricks on the sidewalks. At first it was her name, or her brother’s, or even his. She used to do it like a map, like a reassurance. “Maybe he’ll come this way.”

Chris doesn’t say anything. His family obligations died when his mother did, and all he has left is half of Alicia. He hopes Nick sees it. He’d like to see Alicia all the way whole again one more time, before the end.

++

He sits cross-legged on a mattress in what used to be a motel and winces when she pulls too hard at his scalp. “Sorry,” she murmurs, right in his ear, and his hair rasps against the blade. She lets him up and peers over his shoulder when he goes to the bathroom mirror. She looks cheery for the first time in ages, giggly when he touches the ragged uneven line of his hair. “Sorry,” she says again, and pinches his cheek when he pulls a pout at her.

He spins and catches her around the waist and lifts her up and growls about getting even and she’s laughing, finally laughing and her eyes look focused, like she’s really seeing him and it’s been so long, just so fucking long and she must see it in his face because she softens and cups his cheek and murmurs his name and the bed is covered in his hair so they pile the pillows on the ground and she rests his ear against her heart and rubs his back until he falls asleep, legs tangled.

++

He wakes in the middle of the night in another motel somewhere in the middle of the broke down world and there’s soft, wet noises to his left. He holds still and keeps his breathing even and hears her: quiet whine, bit off curse, slick fingers moving inside her panties. Her leg trembles against his when she comes and she pants at the ceiling before sighing. She rolls over, her arm slinging onto his waist, and kisses his spine through his shirt, a lazy press of damp lips. He thinks he can smell her, delicate in the air and close enough to touch.

++

Alicia doesn’t write her name anymore. He starts finding paper for her. Or cardboard, or fabric, or painted wood. A clean bit of wall. Anything. He brings it to her or leads her to it and she stands there before leaning and writing crooked in the dark. _remember when I broke my arm in the park and you carried me home?_

_remember when you overdosed the first time and left me that letter?_

_remember when you said you’d always be there for me?_

_fuck you nick clarke_

++

They find a one room camping cabin with working water and a tub. Alicia fills it slowly, using a bucket and cups while Chris blockades the door and the windows and sets up the blankets. She yelps when she stands in it and scrubs quickly while he turns his back. When she taps his shoulder she’s still shivering, lips pale, hair wet. He can see her nipples through her shirt.

He washes sloppy and haphazard and shivering and when he’s stepping out she’s watching him. He thinks maybe, if this were Before, he’d blush. Stutter. Cover himself. But he’s not who he used to be and he reaches out his hand and she hands him a shirt he can use as a towel and he ruffles his hair before dragging it briskly across his skin. They eat cold beans out of the can and she tastes like the metal of the lid she smashed open on the ground when she kisses him.

He’s still for a long long time but she doesn’t look upset when she eases back against the wall. They sleep spooned.

 _i miss you_ Alicia writes on the chipped porcelain of the tub, before they leave.

++

They find a car with thick thick wool blankets in the back and Alicia almost whoops with joy. She lines the backseat with them and settles with noise of delight, like it’s a king sized mattress instead of a four door sedan. She reaches a hand for him and he reaches back, automatic. She pulls him on top of her and his face is in her throat and he kisses her neck, soft. She says his name and he’s lost.

++

She’s so much softer than he’d ever thought she’d be. Even with dirt in the creases of her skin and her bones jutting close to the surface, and black circles under her eyes, she’s still so soft.

“Right there,” she says, when he touches her with his rough fingers. “F--uck please, that’s so good.” Her hands on the small of his back, asking for _harder, more._ She traces his spine, after. Lies him on his stomach and kisses between the knobs. Sleeps draped over him, her cheek against his shoulderblade.

He hasn’t seen her use the sharpie in days.

++

They don’t talk much anymore. They walk in the dark with their fingers laced and hide in each other when the sun rises.


End file.
